with the same disadvantages as the act of shooting a man:  one of which is that you can get no more out of him.  It is, I am told, distinctly annoying to blow a fellow creature’s brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember that he was the only person who knew where to get the best Russian cigarettes.  So our Sultan, who is the orderer of the sack, is also the bearer of the bow-string.  A school in which there was no punishment, except expulsion, would be a school in which it would be very difficult to keep proper discipline; and the sort of discipline on which the reformed capitalism will insist will be all of the type which in free nations is imposed only on children.  Such a school would probably be in a chronic condition of breaking up for the holidays.  And the reasons for the insufficiency of this extreme instrument are also varied and evident.  The materialistic Sociologists, who talk about the survival of the fittest and the weakest going to the wall (and whose way of looking at the world is to put on the latest and most powerful scientific spectacles, and then shut their eyes), frequently talk as if a workman were simply efficient or non-efficient, as if a criminal were reclaimable or irreclaimable.  The employers have sense enough at least to know better than that.  They can see that a servant may be useful in one way and exasperating in another; that he may be bad in one part of his work and good in another; that he may be occasionally drunk and yet generally indispensable.  Just as a practical school-master would know that a schoolboy can be at once the plague and the pride of the school.  Under these circumstances small and varying penalties are obviously the most convenient things for the person keeping order; an underling can be punished for coming late, and yet do useful work when he comes.  It will be possible to give a rap over the knuckles without wholly cutting off the right hand that has offended.  Under these circumstances the employers have naturally resorted to fines.  But there is a further ground for believing that the process will go beyond fines before it is completed.

(2) The fine is based on the old European idea that everybody possesses private property in some reasonable degree; but not only is this not true to-day, but it is not being made any truer, even by those who honestly believe that they are mending matters.  The great employers will often do something towards improving what they call the “conditions” of their workers; but a worker might have his conditions as carefully arranged as a racehorse has, and still have no more personal property than a racehorse.  If you take an average poor seamstress or factory girl, you will find that the power of chastising her through her property has very considerable limits; it is almost as hard for the employer of labour to tax her for punishment as it is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax her for revenue.  The next most obvious thing to think of, of course, would be imprisonment,